Shekinah Retreat Centre is set in the river valley on 287 acres of land. With a remarkable setting and some excellent facilities a lot goes on here. The purpose of this blog is to share some of the experiences, stories and moments that make this place what it is... special!

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Monday, 30 March 2015

Spring Melt 2015: A damaged road and could today be the day the river goes?

For everyone in Saskatchewan you will know already how nice
the weather has been. The snow seems to be disappearing at a rate we are happy
with when we think back what everything looked like this time a year ago or
even two years ago. After a couple really long winters we deserve to outside
and enjoying the sun in March, after all it’s nice to remember that not every
winter seems to stretch into April or even May.

The melt at Shekinah has historically brought some
challenges. Well, challenges is probably an understatement if we are thinking
back 23 months ago to the day when the waters rose to unmanageable levels and
pianos floated and you probably know the rest. So how is melt 2015 going for
Shekinah?

Through the month of March we have been watching and
speculating as to how things would go. Certainly there have been a number of factors
in our favour. There is certainly not the snow accumulation that we have seen
in previous years and the warm temperatures have led to a slow melt. All this
is good for us and it was a couple weeks ago now that we saw the river start to
rise and the creek that runs down into the river start to flow. The river has
come up about 5ft from its winter levels and this recent stretch has not seen
any significant rises in water levels even though the creek is now becoming
more of a raging torrent.

And then unexpected happened! It is after all Shekinah right?
On Friday afternoon we walked outside to find a raging torrent in an unexpected
location. Coming down our road! With deep channels already carved out by the
water we went looking for the plugged culvert or the spring that had popped up, but that’s not what we found.

What we found was water draining out of the field at the top
of the hill and flowing “downstream” along the road. After some assessing we
knew we needed to do something, but the question was what exactly? We decided
to build a dam and divert the water to the other side of the road and hopefully
create a new path down the side of the hill rather than our road.

The road was
already a mess but we could potentially mitigate the situation. So we put down
gravel only to see the torrent sweep it along in its path. Eventually we
scraped up some mud and dirt off the road and put it in place. This worked. We
were able to divert the water and we got lucky. We would like to claim that it
was deliberate, but it wasn’t because the water we diverted flowed perfect to a
culvert and so we did have to get it across the other “up” road.

Down by the office the water was pooling on the sidewalk and
threating to breach the threshold. While we had diverted the bulk of the flow
it was still gathering momentum further down the hill as water was running down
the side off the valley to collect with whatever was managing to seep through
our dam wall.

The following video shows us building the second dam on the
down road to drain the water towards a culvert. This time we knew what we were
aiming for.

We were reminded (not that anyone at Shekinah can forget) of
the power of water and the damage that it can do in a very short period of
time. As that memory gets entrenched in the banks we began monitoring the river
for the duration of the weekend. The question looming, when will the ice go and
what will it mean for us?

This Monday 30 March 2015 we are wondering if today will be the
day. With big pools of water on the ice and the channel Reddekop island
completely open the signs are there. The water did not rise overnight, but
there were lots of really loud cracks that were heard coming from the river
yesterday afternoon. Today could be the day and if it goes we hope and pray
that the river ice is rotten enough that it simply breaks down easily and ice
jams will not be a factor. But with Mother Nature you just never know what the
next surprise will be… Watch this space.